Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Secure in the Pantheon., October 11, 2009
I suppose it's arguable that this is a great novel but it's certainly one of the best written in English in the first half of the twentieth century. It's the story of a man who fell in love with a flighty young girl five years earlier, lost track of her while trying to become worthy, then tried to "recapture the past" although she had reverted to flirtatious and materialistic form and married an enormously wealthy buffoon.
Fitzgerald really hit it out of the park with this one. Nothing of his that I've read elsewhere -- excepting a few short stories and essays -- approaches the quality of "The Great Gatsby." It's an immense literary achievement, though it's short and sweet.
It's not a wildly experimental exercise in style -- not Joycean or Faulknerian. Fitzgerald's prose flows along in its own simple, comprehensible, ironic way, with occasional decorative adornments -- fractured sets of impressions here and there, but nothing to impede our interest in the plot.
What I mean is that stuff HAPPENS in "The Great Gatsby." Let me think. Adultery, illegal drinking, a horrible automobile accident, a smashed nose, impolite snubs, unabashed greed, suicide and murder.
It's not a simple love story. Gatsby's love for the shallow Daisy is one of the few things that propel him. It's as fundamental to his character as the air he breathes. He's harnessed to it.
Then there is the covert theme -- not very covert -- of social distinctions, the gap between the awesomely rich and the rest of us. Gatsby is marked as nouveau because "he wears a pink suit", drives a gaudy car, and hangs with the wrong people. "Rich girls don't marry poor boys," is the way Daisy puts it, but she's wrong about that. She might better have said "old money doesn't marry new money." It would still have been off the mark, but less so. And I'm compelled to mention the quietly comic observations that the narrator, Nick Carraway, makes from time to time.
All this, and more, is given to us in some exquisitely genteel prose. Is it okay if I quote some examples? Fitzgerald is describing the desolate neighborhood near the gas station where his mistress lives. "This is a valley of ashes -- a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendant effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men spring up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight."
What he's done in this paragraph (I could have chosen a dozen others) is move subtly from the metaphorical to the real with our hardly being sensible of it. Of course, piles of ashes aren't really houses and chimneys, but the men with the spades are material enough. Yet the whole thing fits together like a painting, the laborers barely discernible among the clouds of ash.
Fitzgerald can give us a flash shot of character. The narrator, Nick Carraway, visits Tom, an arrogant, cruel, self-indulgent ex-football player he met at Yale but hasn't seen for years. Tom waits for him, legs apart, at the stop of the stairs. Then he puts his arm over Nick's shoulders, turns him around, and sweeps his hand across the vista presented by the estate he lives in. Tom's first sentence: "I've got a nice place here."
Fitzgerald can write "pretty" too. Daisy and Tom live in an atmosphere that's constantly compared to champagne, wedding cakes, icing, filigree, and white toilet powder. Gatsby's night-time social brawls: "In his blue gardens, the girls and men came and went like moths among the champagne and the whispering and the stars." One sentence gives us everything we need to know. "Blue gardens." "Moths."
It's not just the style that makes this an outstanding novel. It's the structure too. In Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," the major star, Janet Leigh, is murdered half-way through the film. One gasps, killing off the star with a brutal murderer who comes out of nowhere. Fitzgerald does pretty much the same thing with the mystery that constantly simmers behind Gatsby's real identity. Who is Gatsby? Where does he come from? How did he make his fortune? Did he kill a man? The answers are traditionally saved for the climactic ending but Fitzgerald throws them at us half-way through the story, as the maniac sweeps aside the shower curtain and puts an end to the heroine in the bath tub. A daring and risky step.
When Gatsby finally begins to grasp Daisy's true nature, "he must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is...." And, of course, the book's last sentence is one of the best remembered in American literature, drawing our attention in the direction of dead visions, and not just Gatsby's.
|
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hardback Edition of an Enduring Classic, September 25, 2009
I absolutely love this book. It's one of my all time favorites, the paradigmatic story of romantic obsession (which, like all true romances, ends in betrayal or death--in this case, both). What raises this romance far above the genre is its profound insights into both human nature and America as an ideal and a culture, and the quality of Fitzgerald's writing: from his masterly employment of literary tropes and his gorgeous prose to his unforgettable characters and evocative descriptions of places and events, Fitgerald's "The Great Gatsby" sets unsurpassed standards for great fiction. It has a permanent place on my bookshelves and in my heart.
The San Val hardback edition is a step up if you want this for a home library. But if I were going to buy a hardback and also wanted a great scholarly introduction to the text, I'd invest in the Harold Bloom critical edition.
|
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Summer of `22, November 10, 2008
Aside from the narrator, Mr. Carroway, who chances to be Gatsby's perceptive neighbor, we are the only ones who ever come to know the man. Everyone else sees only a fragment of him... if that. And he is far from what he appears to be. We ultimately know him as delusional, obsessive, pitiable, and needy. The fact is he's quite a bit like many of us; the difference is in the contrast between his external persona and his internal one. Fitzgerald's remarkable achievement in this book is in portraying Gatsby's dimensionality so completely in 180 pages. From shadowy playboy to abandoned corpse in 180 pages. And in the process Fitzgerald treats us to his remarkable craft:
"Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside - East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety."
"...there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings."
"Everyone suspects himself of at least one cardinal virtue..."
"He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could `come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden."
"...I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes."
"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind..."
"At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the room."
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Cliffs Notes
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
by Kathleen Parkinson
by J. D. Salinger
by Mark Twain
